Would you say non-white people born & raised in England are English?

[rack909]

Just thought I should hear people’s perspective on this.

Some say it’s an ethnicity, some say it’s a nationality & others say it’s both of them.

I personally think it’s both a Nationality & ethnic group.

If someone says they are from England, they are denoting their nationality as English even if they don’t say it outright. It’s the same thing.

Some of it has been deleted, tbf. But I agree.

Another weird point is that people treat ‘white’ here like an ethnicity but it is not. It is a racial grouping that contains a spectrum of ethnicities, but itself it is not an ethnicity.

But this thread is essentially the question, what does it mean to be English? Would you have the same issues if say in Indian someone asked, what does it mean to be Indian? Or in Germany, what does it mean to be German (both of which are arguably more complex questions?

If that is essentially the question then why mention 'non white' in the OP?

Me three! Appalled they didn’t take it down.

The question asked by the Op is can black and Asian people call themselves English.

Yes I think black and Asian people can refer to themselves as English.

My initial thought would be yes, but it’s a fairly complex question. If I move to Jamaica next week with my toddler and pop out a second baby, do I say/feel I have one English child and one Jamaican child? Maybe if DC2 loves Bob Marley, Biftas and Bobsleigh.

What if your second child grows up in Jamaica and settles there and never lives in the UK, will you allow them to call themselves Jamaican?

Even if they don't like your stereo typical examples?

If the locals don’t accept you as such, then you should refrain from calling yourself a ‘Jamaican’.

I know a white British guy that become a Japanese citizen (you actually have to give up your passport to do this) and it’s laughable to locals to think he’s ’Japanese’ because he’s so very obviously not. But his children could be (though perhaps not fully accepted as such).

They are the locals. Born and raised. That is the point.

Again a referral to 'the English'. If only it were as simple as you make it out to be. Which English people, exactly? What cultural history? A fondness for Morris dancing and Eccles cakes?

The Cornish; the Pearly Kings & Queens from London; farming folk from the Yorkshire Dales (ask them how they feel about Lancastrians😂); the good citizens from Berwick-upon Tweed, maybe? Would they all say they share the exact same ancestry, ancestral territory or cultural history? Cornwall even has its own language.

Yet Jamaica is one of the most colonised places in the world and the indigenous people were wiped out by the europeans (in the not too distant past) so the current ethnicity of the population there is far more recently established than that of England. But according to @RingoJuice if the locals in Jamaica don't accept you as Jamaican you can't call yourself that, but in England, anyone can call themselves English whether the locals agree or not and they are racist if they don't accept that.

(not agreeing with this, but playing devils advocate)

English are one of the more coherent ethnicities worldwide. So if you are unable to identify an English person, you probably have trouble understanding anything beyond crude racial categories.

This thread gets worse- do people really think that we don't have a common English or British culture because there is a degree of regional variation? We're a small island compared to many countries and regional variation is present in other countries too. Italy for example has strong regional identities and local cuisines.

Well, maybe I’m more liberal as I don’t really think it would be up to me to allow them to choose whether they identify as Jamaican.

Of course they are but their heritage might be such and such

This is an artificial standard.

Is there a Korean ethnicity? I'd say yes. Yet the lives of people in Korea are starkly different from one another (especially across the border).

Earlier in reply to a PP you seemed to accept there are Welsh and Scottish ethnicities (just not English). I'm sure you aren't so crass as to claim all Scots behave identically or have no rivalries or local identities, or that Scottish ethnicity reduces ultimately to kilts or ceilidhs.

Why the English exceptionalism? I think from many English people (perhaps not you, I don't know) it's really a sort of un-thought-through chauvinism that goes something like "of course they are an ethnicity. But not us, we're just normal.", or "of course they're all, in some way, recognisable the same, but not us. We are each such special snowflakes with our special dances we couldn't possibly be grouped together".

Yes, Jamaica offers unrestricted birthright citizenship, meaning anyone born in Jamaica automatically becomes a Jamaican citizen.

no. I have lots of friends in Asia who are either British or American - born in Asia. They are not described as 'asian'...

I agree with you. Some people are insisting that 'English' is an ethnicity, and when I've challenged it and asked them to explain, apparently they say it means a shared ancestry, ancestral region, culture and language. So according to their definition, if your ethnicity is not 'English' you aren't English.

Your question isn't about ethnicity, but about race, because you don't seem concerned about people of immigrant backgrounds who are white. If a Black or Brown person, born in the UK is (according to your question) not necessarily English, what about someone born and raised in England of white French parents, or white Norwegian parents. Any problem considering them English?

Exactly

Do you know who also insists on it? Census forms🤷
As I said early if people believe English, Scottish and Welsh are not ethnicities, you might want to discuss it with government.

Ethnicity is not race, nor automatically same as nationality.

What is your definition of ethnicity?

The English have been a distinct ethnicity for 1000 years. That’s quite a long history. As a group they cluster closer to Germanic people than to their Celtic neighbors, which I find absolutely fascinating.